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157 Appendix I Reflections on Changing Times: Political Obstinacy, Legacies and the Anglophone Problem (Being a series of newspaper articles that appeared in The Post newspaper October and November 2000) Politics in some parts of the South has earned for itself the tag of a “dirty game”. One would not be idealising to say that competitive politics based on popular sovereignty has reached a stage of refinement in the North. Proof of this is the willingness of politicians to step down when confronted with a vote of no confidence, a scandal, the loss of popularity or failure to win elections. There is a dirty side, true, but this left in the dark, in those domains out of the glaring eye of the electorate. This is not the same in the South where politicians do not care to observe the tides and are willing to use force or guile to cling to power, force the course of events or push an idea through. The difference in the two political attitudes is that one is based on realistic political analysis and objective values such as patriotism while the second is based on the egoistic tendency to win at all course even against the odds. This attitude, which I choose to term political obstinacy, is accompanied by acts such as the refusal to accept defeat, election rigging, the use of force to achieve objectives (hiring of thugs, violence), deceiving the electorate, taking advantage of an innocent and ignorant electorate, rejection of compromise and corruption. The consequence of this type of political behaviour is popular disenchantment with politics, elector apathy and the initiation of a cycle of vice (witness the maxim: violence begets violence). The present reflections will take as example the question of the territory and people of the Northwest and Southwest Provinces of the Republic of Cameroon, once administered by the British under a league of Nations and the United Nations mandates as Southern Cameroons and which existed for eleven years as the Federated State of West Cameroon within the context of a federal experiment. The question we are going to answer here is that of the cause of the malaise which has been referred to as the Anglophone question. Although many reasons have been advanced to account for this malaise namely, the naively, low level of education of English speaking politicians, the Machiavellian attitude of Mr. Ahidjo and his successor, internecine disputes 158 amongst Anglophone politicians and the demographic, intellectual and economic imbalances between the negotiating parties at independence, our hypothesis is that these are contributing factors but not sufficient enough to explain the turn of events. Our contention is that the main factor that has contributed to the present crisis that is known as the Anglophone question is the style of politics we have described above as obstinate politics. We will examine this style of politics and its relation, its consequences or the present crisis and the possibilities for solutions. Predictable Outcomes of Obstinate Politics: The Difficulties of the Cameroon’s Options and Politics of Independence If there is a controversy over the status of the English speaking people in Cameroon today, this was predictable looking at the style of politics that characterized the transition process. It was marked by insincerity, falsehood and manipulation. I will recount some of the instances that have either been reported in print or still form part of the memory of some of the actors. In order to prove that they had been maltreated in the Nigerian Eastern House of Assembly, the KNC group brought stones to show their people that they had been chased away. Geologists may bear me out but what difference is there between Enugu stones and those of Mamfe for instance? There is apparently no plausible reason why late Dr. Foncha’s faction broke away from the KNC to form an independent political movement if not for selfish reasons. This is evidently the germ of the so-called Northwest/Southwest divide and its consequent regional politics. This put a deep divide in the English speaking delegation during the negotiations. Objectively there was no reason why late Foncha’s KNDP group opted to join French Cameroons. It is true that transfrontier peoples existed (e.g. Douala-Bakweri, Dschang-Fontem, Bamboutos-Ngemba, Bakossi-Mbo Bakaka) but the same situation can also be observed across the Southern Cameroon-Nigerian border. On the contrary, the independence war in French Cameroon and the linguistic barrier was a security deterrent that could have militated against such an...

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